Many fascist movements had imperialistic aims. Hitler hoped that his Drang nach Osten (“drive toward the east”), by conquering eastern Europe and Russia, would not only prove the racial superiority of Aryans over Slavs but also provide enough plunder and Lebensraum (“living space”) to overcome continuing economic difficulties at home. Mussolini’s imperial ambitions were directed at North Africa, and his armies invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Polish fascists advocated retaking all the lands that had ever been ruled by Polish kings, including East Prussia. Finnish fascists wanted to create a “Greater Finland” at the expense of Russia, and Croatian fascists advocated a “Greater Croatia” at the expense of Serbia. Japanese fascists preached military conquest on behalf of their plan for a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” French fascists were strong defenders of the French empire in Indochina and North Africa, and during the interwar period they attracted considerable support among the ruling European minority (colons) in Algeria. Portuguese fascists waged colonial wars in Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique. Syrian, Iraqi, and Egyptian fascist movements also supported territorial expansionism. However, there were some “peace fascisms” that were not imperialistic, such as the Integralist Action movement in Brazil.

Military values

Fascists favoured military values such as courage, unquestioning obedience to authority, discipline, and physical strength. They also adapted the outward trappings of military organizations, such as paramilitary uniforms and Roman salutes. Hitler imagined a God who presided over military conflicts and ensured the survival of the fittest. Mussolini was famous for slogans such as “A minute on the battlefield is worth a lifetime of peace,” “Better to live an hour like a lion than a hundred years like a sheep,” and “Nothing has ever been won in history without bloodshed.” Similarly, a pamphlet published by the Japanese War Ministry in 1934 declared: “War is the father of creation and the mother of culture.” The songs of Spanish Falangists extolled the nobility of death in war. Like many fascists, the French writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, author of the fascist novel Gilles, prided himself on his “tough-minded” realism, which accepted killing as a principle of nature. La Rocque’s organization, originally a war veterans’ movement, prided itself on the martial “spirit of the Cross of Fire,” and its spokesmen made nefarious comparisons between “virile” combat soldiers and “decadent” civilian politicians.

Hitler envisioned the ideal German society as a Volksgemeinschaft, a racially unified and hierarchically organized body in which the interests of individuals would be strictly subordinate to those of the nation, or Volk. Like a military battalion, the people’s community would be permanently prepared for war and would accept the discipline that this required. The Italian, French, and Spanish versions of this doctrine, known as “integral nationalism,” were similarly illiberal, though not racist. The Japanese version, known as the “family-system principle,” maintained that the nation is like a family: it is strong only when the people obey their leaders in the same way children obey their parents.

Mass mobilization

Fascists characteristically attempted to win popular support and consolidate their power by mobilizing the population in mass meetings, parades, and other gatherings. Exploiting principles borrowed from modern American advertising, which stressed the importance of appealing to the audience’s emotions rather than to its reason, fascists used such gatherings to create patriotic fervour and to encourage fanatic enthusiasm for the fascist cause. The Nazi rallies at Nürnberg, for example, were organized with theatrical precision and featured large banners, paramilitary uniforms, martial music, torchlight parades, bonfires, and forests of fascist salutes accompanied by prompted shouts of “Sieg Heil!” Hitler believed it best to hold such gatherings at night, when audiences would be more susceptible than in the daytime to irrational appeals. Fascists also sought to regiment the population, especially young people, by infiltrating local social networks—tavern groups and veteran, sports, church, student, and other organizations—and providing soup kitchens, vacation outings, and nationalistic ceremonies for townspeople. In France, La Rocque’s French Social Party dispensed meals to the unemployed and offered workers access to swimming pools, social clubs, and vacation grounds in order to entice them into the movement.

Mussolini’s regime in Italy and Salazar’s government in Portugal also held government-organized mass rallies. After 1936 Japanese fascists paid less attention to mass mobilization than to working directly with the nation’s elites. The dictatorship that followed was based on a coalition of military leaders, industrialists, state bureaucrats, and conservative party politicians.

Fascists defended the Führerprinzip (“leadership principle”), the belief that the party and the state should have a single leader with absolute power. Hitler was the Führer and Mussolini the Duce, both words for the “leader” who gave the orders that everyone else had to obey. The authority of the leader was often enhanced by his personal charisma.

The leadership principle was also conceived to apply at lower levels of the political and social hierarchy. Fascist organizations sometimes exhibited the so-called “corporal syndrome,” in which persons willingly submit to the authority of those above them in exchange for the gratification they derive from dominating those below. Japanese fascists believed that owners of stores and workshops should exercise “paternal” authority over their assistants, clerks, workers, servants, and tenants. Subordinates were not permitted to organize themselves into unions, and the small bosses assumed the leadership of town and village councils. As historian Masao Maruyama notes, this mind-set affected the way many Japanese shop masters viewed their nation’s foreign policy in the 1930s: “The resistance of the East Asian peoples to Japanese imperialism aroused the same psychological reactions among them as the resistance of their subordinates in the shops, workplaces, and other groups under their control. Thus they became the most ardent supporters of the China Incident [the Mukden Incident (1931), in which Japanese troops seized the Manchurian city of Mukden] and the Pacific War.”

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